E-commerce growth is accelerating and is expected to continue to grow at a staggering pace. As it does, the internet as a retail distribution channel has become more and more powerful. To keep up with this projected growth, e-commerce platforms, solutions, and CMS software will need to evolve to meet new customer needs. One way that Magento maintains itself as a leading e-commerce platform is by offering its customers timely and innovative e-commerce extensions in its multi-vendor marketplace.

Magento’s open-source platform provides online sellers a flexible shopping cart system and full control over the design of their online shops. Its multi-vendor extension marketplace helps its customers to stay ahead of the marketing curve in order to offer superior e-commerce shopping experiences.

‍Emerging Trend: Customers Want Authenticity

‍In today’s digital age, increased usage of smartphone and social apps has rapidly and significantly changed the face of digital marketing. To adapt, innovative brands are embracing the online communities that they’ve cultivated and are finding new ways to collaborate with customers. This has led to an emerging focus on how brands encourage and leverage the content that customers are creating and sharing about them online.

Often this content takes the shape of a customer review. Whether text or visual, brands have realized that real customer reviews can not only be used to help build brand trust and social proof (85 percent of users find visual UGC more influential than brand photos or videos) but also can be used to help tell the brand story in a more authentic way.  As a result, customer reviews are becoming an increasingly important and necessary component of every e-commerce website.

True to form, Magento is helping its customers stay on top of this marketing trend. Here are three extensions that its multi-vendor marketplace offers in order to add social proof to your Magento storefront.

‍Feefo’s Ratings & ReviewsThe Feefo Ratings and Reviews extension allows brands to invite customers to leave feedback and reviews post-purchase. Feefo has a robust approval system that filters out spam users. The extension will send a personalized email to each new customer, to ensure that each review is left from an actual buyer, not a spam bot.

The Feefo Ratings and Reviews extension is free to install with a Feefo account.

‍Pixlee Content Marketing Platform  The Pixlee Social Commerce and Visual Reviews extension allows brands to collect, curate, permission, display, and measure the effects of user-generated content images and videos on their Magento stores. The extension uses image recognition technology to tag brand products in each photo or video in order to render the visuals interactive and shoppable on your storefront.

The Pixlee Social Commerce and Visual Reviews extension is free to install with a Pixlee account.

‍Magento’s Testimonials The Magento Testimonials extension offers brands the ability to collect five-star and text testimonials. The extension allows customers to rate products on a five-star scale and to add text testimonials to their e-commerce stores. Magento’s Testimonials extension verifies the authenticity of each review and allows brands to display testimonials in various locations on their e-commerce site.

‍Conclusion There any many ways that brands can encourage and leverage the content that customers are creating and sharing about them online. The above three extensions available in Magento’s marketplace will help your brand to tell a more authentic brand story and to generate social proof for your brand and its products on your e-commerce storefront.

To see Pixlee’s Magento integration in action, check out this PFI Western case study.